Splitting taste into 17 axes
Beer flavour isn't captured by "bitter versus sweet" alone. Citrus aroma, roasted depth, acidity, a light or heavy body — these vary independently, and two beers both called "IPA" can be balanced completely differently.
Bakushu breaks flavour into 17 dimensions, each scored from 0.0 to 1.0: bitterness, sweetness, sourness, dryness, body lightness, roastiness, fruitiness, citrus, floral, pine resin, spice, funk, maltiness, hop aroma intensity, alcohol strength, adventurousness, and preference for sessionability.
Each one is explained in the taste dimensions guide.
Turning answers into a vector
Every diagnosis question maps to a few of those dimensions. "Do you enjoy strong citrus aromas?", for instance, moves the citrus, hop-aroma, and fruitiness values.
Stacked together, your answers produce 17 numbers — your taste vector. That is a far finer description than a label like "citrus-hop type" could be: it's specific to you.
Measuring closeness to a brewery
Every brewery in the catalogue carries a vector on the same 17 dimensions. Comparing how closely your vector and a brewery's vector point in the same direction lets us rank breweries by fit. That "closeness of direction" is a calculation called cosine similarity.
The key point is that this isn't just a search for "breweries with lots of bitter beer." It looks at the shape across all 17 dimensions, so the breweries closest to the whole picture of your taste rise to the top.
Why every result comes with a reason
Bakushu always shows why a brewery is recommended. It can point to which dimensions matched because it runs on an explainable model, not a black box. When a result looks off, the reason lets you rethink your own preferences too.
If you haven't taken it yet, start with the three-minute taste diagnosis. The result feeds straight into finding breweries.